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The Tomatometer rating – based on the published opinions of hundreds of film and television critics – is a trusted measurement of movie and TV programming quality for millions of moviegoers. It represents the percentage of professional critic reviews that are positive for a given film or television show.

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Fresh

The Tomatometer is 60% or higher.

Rotten

The Tomatometer is 59% or lower.

Certified Fresh

Movies and TV shows are Certified Fresh with a steady Tomatometer of 75% or higher after a set amount of reviews (80 for wide-release movies, 40 for limited-release movies, 20 for TV shows), including 5 reviews from Top Critics.

You never feel like you're watching a play on film: The way Morgan has opened up the proceedings in his screenplay feels organic under the direction of Ron Howard, who has crafted his finest film yet, and one of the year's best.

This is the irony of Frost/Nixon: Though it chronicles the moment when (in theory) the 37th president of the United States was cut down to size, the movie's presentation of him is utterly larger than life.

Langella is not a natural Nixon; he has a voluptuary's face and a self-assurance the president only dreamed of. So he burrows into Nixon and comes out with a figure who is less a simulacrum than the definitive interpretation.

Both a crackerjack entertainment and a sharp look at the roots, and limitations, of ambition, while stars Frank Langella (Nixon) and Michael Sheen (Frost) put on the year's most provocative and finely tuned display of dueling egos.

Despite a moving, canny incarnation of the man by Frank Langella, despite a slickly entertaining coffee-table production as only Ron Howard knows how, the movie feels cooked up. In the name of dramatizing history, Frost/Nixon sacrifices it.

The sheer fun of Frost/Nixon -- and fun is the right word -- is not only in watching these men in collision. It's also in watching them together, in the same frame, as two contrasting aspects of humanity.

To luxuriate in Langella's magnificent performance -- as a man unable to small-talk, unable to pet a dachshund convincingly, who can feel only privately -- is to appreciate how movies can ennoble even the worst of us.

One of the virtues of Frost/Nixon, Ron Howard's adaptation of Peter Morgan's hit play, is that it brings the intelligence back to the forefront without dispelling the elements of menace and fraudulence that were also part of Nixon's temperament.